My adventure in book publishing ;)

Rosalynn’s Grandmother turns 80 this year and as a present Rosalynn has put together a great little family cookbook. Aunties, uncles and cousins all sent in their favourite recipes and on Nana’s birthday everyone will be getting a rather professional looking cookbook in the mail.

We published it on Lulu.com.

Lulu’s simple little tools and step-by-step instructions made it incredibly quick and easy. Format a Word document, upload a front and back cover and your done. And the price was fantastic.

For me this was a really powerful example of what the web has made available for everyday folk. We just published a simple book! 10 years ago that would have taken us a few months and cost thousands of dollars.

Rent your games, DVDs and now parking spaces

Two cool companies I came across over the weekend (via Springwise). I guess you could add these to the Companies I Wish I’d Thought of Starting list, but I’m so wrapped up in GigPark I don’t have that reaction anymore ;).

1. I Let You

Basic premise: Set up your own NetFlix style store and rent your games and DVDs to anyone that wants them. The company aims to give us access to the estimated 10 billion DVDs in American households. They are in private beta mode at the moment but I love the simple idea behind I Let You. People have, and create, a lot of value and this seems like a great tool for letting you monitise some of it. Which leads me to the second company…

2. Peasy (Parking made easy)

Basic premise: An online marketplace for parking spaces. Again, all of us have certain things that are worth money, in this case a parking space, and Peasy is a tool to help us monitize it. The company is based in the UK and, from what I can see, only offers spaces in England at the moment. I expect they’ll export the idea to the US soon if they aren’t cloned by someone else first. The business model? – Peasy tasks 12% commission on every spot rented, which works out to a pretty penny in a place like London where a space can cost thousands of pounds per year.

Second installment of Companies I Wish I’d Thought of Starting

I signed up to ThisNext today. The site helps you keep track of products you think are cool and see what other people like the look of. It looks like it’ll be a great way for me to recommend products to friends (check out my ThisNext page) and to keep track of new products in categories I care about (search the community and then subscribe to an RSS feed of the search).

Basic functionality = Tag and save products you like – either through a link on thisnext.com or using a nice little browser plug-in (think del.icio.us). The products you like populate a profile page and the tags mean you can search for the most popular products being saved by the whole community. Nice.

The revenue model isn’t immediately apparent but with all of that shopping information the ad targeting potential is huge. For example, it’s very easy to find the taste-makers on the site – the ability to advertise to them, send them product samples or conduct research with them should be pretty lucrative.

First installment of Companies I Wish I’d Thought of Starting

Every once in a while a company will launch and I’ll get a sinking feeling in my stomach. Followed by a feeling of jealousy because I didn’t think of the idea, and then happiness because I’ll get to use their products or services.

WeatherBill is a company like that.

WeatherBill launched last week with a nice little web site and an all star list of financial backers. The site lets people take out insurance on weather events that effect you or your business. So, for example I’m going to take out a policy for my next holiday to San Francisco. If it rains more than 3 of the 7 days I’m away I want to be paid out $200 per day. On WeatherBill this policy will cost me $74.82.

WeatherBill makes sense for any kind of business that is impacted by weather – from a golf course to a farmer to a baseball team. Gamblers will love using it too ;).